Five A.M.

The alarm was set for 4:50, but Malik was awake before it, the way he was most mornings now. He switched it off before it could ring and lay still in the dark, listening to the building settle around him. Then he got up, because lying there was worse.

The walk to the gym took eleven minutes. He knew because he had stopped counting steps a long time ago and started counting streetlights instead. There were nineteen.

At that hour the gym belonged to almost no one. A radio murmured behind the front desk. An older man walked slowly on a treadmill by the window, reading a newspaper folded into quarters. Malik nodded to him, the way they always nodded to each other, and went to the heavy bag at the back.

He liked this hour for the same reason he liked the bag: it asked one thing of him, and he could give it. Nobody needed him to explain anything. The bag didn’t care what he had done. It only cared what he did next.

He wrapped his hands and started slow. Jab, cross, step. Breathe. Again. Somewhere in the third round the noise in his head finally fell away, and for a few minutes there was only his breathing and the chain creaking overhead, and the sky in the high windows turning from black to blue.

This was the one hour he trusted himself.

When he sat down on the bench to unwind his hands, his phone was lit up on top of his bag.

He didn’t pick it up. He didn’t have to. He could see enough of the name from where he sat, and the first few words of the message before the preview cut off. He reached over and turned the phone face down.

Then he sat there longer than he meant to, wraps half off, looking at the back of the phone as if it might turn itself over.

Can God rebuild what I helped destroy?

He didn’t say it. He didn’t even think it in words. It was just there, underneath everything, the way the ache in his shoulders would be there all day.

The older man had finished. On his way out he slowed by the bench, tucked the newspaper under his arm and said, “Same time tomorrow?” the way people say it in gyms, not really a question.

“Same time,” Malik said.

He finished unwrapping his hands and rolled the wraps up tight, the way he always did. He put the phone in his pocket without turning it over. He didn’t answer the message. He didn’t delete it, either.

On the walk home the streetlights were going out one by one as the sky came up grey and then gold. He counted them anyway. Nineteen. It was easier than counting anything else.